With the Internet amassing marketing money once reserved for the newspapers, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today think making a stink will improve the bottom line. The two publications plan to test scented ads to bolster print ad revenue. The two papers are working with a company called Scentisphere, which sells a product called Rub’nSmell.
Unlike the scratch-and-sniff technology that has been around for some 30 years, (remember the stickers we collected as kids), Rub’nSmell represents a significant advance because it can be applied directly to printed ads as an ink, says Bob Bernstein, president of Scentisphere. No separate print run to create scented inserts is required.

via informationweek.com

This post is nothing more that a cry for help..for empathy. Have you seen the “Lower My Bills” tile ads. These ads are everywhere! As pervasive as the Giggle IQ test. You’ve seen the newest one right…the silhouetted dancing guy in a suit shaking his hips like Elvis. They are built in Flash. They are awful, ugly, poorly designed from a purely aesthetic perspective…they are today’s “Punch the Monkey” ad.

And, importantly, they exist because of credit card debt since they are selling dept consolidation. Is there any way we can clean up our web world of these kinds of eyesores? (The correct answer is: no.) And beyond the topic of design, the savings rate in the USA is negative. Yes, Americans spend more than they save. I guess that’s what trickle down economics means.